


Airplanes to Elevators

by agentverbivore (verbivore8642)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, First Meetings, Fitz's POV, Fluff, Gen, Meet-Cute, Tumblr Prompt, kid!Skye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 04:42:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3236636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verbivore8642/pseuds/agentverbivore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Fitz is bored on a long flight, he starts talking to the young girl next to him - and her very pretty older sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Airplanes to Elevators

**Author's Note:**

> Written as theblakesiblings' prize for my tumblr giveaway! Ok, I know I SAID 400 words... clearly that didn't happen.
> 
> The request was "You fell asleep and I started making funny faces at your little sibling to keep them amused and the steward mistook us for a couple AU." I diverged from that to a certain extent, but the spirit of the prompt is still there!
> 
> A HUGE thanks to astrotimbre for being my science advisor again, and for trading various versions of the coding scene with me until I got it within an acceptable range of accuracy!
> 
> Unedited.

Fitz couldn’t stand flights longer than eight hours; no matter what he brought to watch or read, he always found himself bored to tears halfway through. The real problem, if he was being honest, was that airlines tended to frown upon their passengers disassembling the plane’s electronics, and after that much time sitting still that’s really all he wanted to do. Just to have something to fidget with, to break apart and put together again. But they also frowned upon people bringing their _own_ gadgets to reassemble, so he was stuck without really having anything to do. Accordingly, his eyes wandered to the passengers nearby; a large man was snoring rather loudly in the seat in front of him, and the pretty woman sitting two seats away (along the opposite aisle) was nibbling at her pen as she stared down at her crossword puzzle.

His eyes were drawn, however, to the activity of the kindergarten-age girl sitting in the middle seat next to him. She had a small laptop open in front of her and, much to his shock, he realized that she was _coding_ something. It was in a brightly-colored font, but it was absolutely some kind of code terminal. Fitz had never heard of a child her age doing such a thing, so he leaned over and peered at the screen, trying to parse out what she was typing.

“Is that an I.D.E.?” The question slipped out as he picked up the environment in which she was working, and the girl’s eyes flitted over to him. 

She assessed him for a moment in that frank way children have of deciding whether you’re a threat or even of interest, and then nodded. “I’m practicing how to hack into the Neopets system.”

“Crack,” Fitz murmured, squinting more closely at her screen.

“What?” As she turned her head, slightly-too-long bangs fell into her eyes and she brushed them away, frowning at him.

After a moment more of being distracted by what was on her screen, Fitz blinked and glanced back at her. “Cracking. What you’re doing is ‘cracking.’ You don’t hack a –” 

“I know that,” she snapped. Evidently he’d hit upon a sore subject. “Hacking _sounds_ way cooler. I’m a hacker – who wants to be called a ‘cracker?’”

Leaning back slightly, Fitz raised an eyebrow, trying to think of a good counterargument to her kid-logic. When he came up empty, he just shrugged, and looked back at her screen. “You want to _crack_ a...” He had a vague idea that it was a game website for kids, but didn’t know more than that. “... Computer game? Isn’t that – well, cheating?” 

The girl gave him a derisive snort and turned back to her laptop. “Neopets is an industrial-capitalist sham hell-bent on hiding the truth from its citizens.”

His jaw dropped and he scratched the back of his head, looking over at her guardian, who didn’t seem at all perturbed by her charge’s abnormally large vocabulary. “How old are you?”

“Ten,” she muttered, giving him a quick glare. “I’m short for my age.” After a few keystrokes, she turned to stare straight at him. “How old are _you_?” 

Fitz let out a real laugh, then, and glanced up to see that the pretty woman sitting next to the girl was smiling over at them. She nodded slightly, as if to say that he could keep talking to her charge, so he dropped his gaze back to the miniature genius sitting next to him. “I’m twenty-four,” he replied, and held out his hand. “Fitz.”

Giving him an almost-surprisingly strong shake for someone of her size, she grinned. “Skye.” 

“It’s Mary, actually.” Fitz started at the soft, British accent, especially considering that the young girl’s accent was definitely American. When he looked at the woman, brows furrowed, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, perhaps indicating her hesitance to interrupt. “Her real name is Mary –” 

Skye groaned, pushing petulantly back into her seat. “Is not.”

The woman rolled her eyes and sighed – this clearly wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument. “Skye –” 

“See?” The girl smiled in satisfaction, but the woman didn’t recognize what was supposed to be her defeat.

“If you don’t like Mary,” she said, a teasing note sliding into her words, “you could always go by your middle name.”

Skye groaned and snapped her laptop closed. “Eugh, Daisy’s even _worse_.” She stood quickly, clearly annoyed with the turn the conversation had taken, and shuffled over the woman’s legs as she muttered something about the bathroom.

The woman – who Fitz swore became prettier the longer he looked at her – turned around once Skye was gone and gave him an apologetic smile. He couldn’t help but give her a skeptical look. “Mary Daisy...?”

She laughed and turned herself more fully towards him, tucking her pen into the pages of her crossword puzzle book. “Ridiculous, I know, but evidently my parents had become bored with more traditional names like Jemma by the time they adopted my sister.” A small blush bloomed on her cheeks, and she hurried to add: “That’s me, by the way. Jemma.”

Finding himself charmed just about everything she did, he smiled back at her. “Fitz.” When she gave him a wry look, he chuckled, ducking his head. “Leo Fitz, but I’ve never much liked my first name. Guess I can’t judge your sister for that, actually.” Warmth spread up the back of his neck as she dropped her eyes to where her slim fingers were tracing the edge of her book, and he tried desperately to think of something to say; he didn’t often manage to make beautiful women smile, and now he was vaguely panicked by the thought that he wouldn’t be able to do it again.

“Why are you traveling to Seoul?” Jemma’s gaze met his again, and he tried not to deflate. This was usually where he lost the interest of any woman whose attention he accidentally managed to catch, so he attempted to casually brush off the question.

“Oh, just a research and development convention for my –”

“The SHIELD Annual?” 

He met her eyes again, the note of excitement in her voice almost catching. “Yeah,” Fitz answered, “are you...”

“Me, too!” Jemma’s face lit up and she leaned forward, as if she wasn’t used to casually meeting someone whose work coincided with hers either. “Skye hasn’t traveled much, so my parents decided to make it a family vacation of a sort. For them, anyway. I’ll be locked in a room with a few hundred scientists for four days.” She spoke in a rush, and he laughed, knowing that much the same fate awaited him – but then something occurred to him and he froze. 

“Wait,” he breathed, feeling like a dolt for not thinking of this immediately. “Jemma. You’re not Jemma _Simmons_.”

That was definitely a blush on her cheeks this time, although she resolutely held his gaze. “Guilty as charged,” she answered, giving a quick ‘what-can-you-do-about-it’ shrug. 

Fitz inhaled sharply. Forget her being pretty – she was half the reason why he’d bothered signing up for the damned convention in the first place. “I’ve read all your studies,” he let out in a rush. “You’re a bloody _genius_ with dendrotoxins.”

“Oh!” She opened her mouth to say something, but Fitz spoke right over her, only conscious of the fact that she’d quirked her lips up in a brief smile after his initial confession.

“I mean, with all the rest, too, not just dendrotoxins, but I’m especially interested in your proposals for their utilization in nonlethal weaponry.” Sucking in a breath, he mumbled out the rest as quickly as he could, before he lost his nerve. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to show you the designs I’ve drawn up for a delivery system that I think would work without causing the toxin to lose potency before it reached the target.”

The only thing that kept Fitz from apologizing and burying his face in the inflight magazine after that rambling disaster was the fact that Jemma was leaning halfway over the middle seat by the time he finished, nodding enthusiastically even before he’d stopped talking. “I would _love_ to see them,” she breathed. “No one else seems to have any clue what to do with the idea –”

She frowned, though, when he let out a sudden groan, dropping his face into the palm of his hand. “I’ve just realized that I packed them in my bloody suitcase.”

To his surprise, Jemma just smiled, and scribbled something on a used crossword page and then tore it out. “Probably not much room to talk shop on the plane anyway,” she teased, handing over the paper. “We’ll just have to make time to meet during the convention.” 

The cost of the entire trip had just been made up in Fitz’s mind, never mind the fact that a beautiful woman had given him her phone number without his asking. A brilliant scientist whose work he’d admired for years actually wanted to hear his proposals and consider _collaborating with him_. He may be a genius, but for some reason the other scientists in his lab had little to no desire to work with him. Although, to be fair, he’d never been especially interested in working with them either – none of them could ever keep up with him. But if Jemma’s published works were any indication, he would very much like to try collaborating with her.

Fitz belatedly realized he was just staring at the paper with his mouth hanging open in a very ungainly manner and quickly rearranged his face into a grin. As he tucked the phone number very carefully into his breast pocket, he tried to think of something witty and urbane with which to respond to her overture – but a tap on his shoulder interrupted his train of thought.

“Excuse me, sir...?” A weary flight attendant assigned to another section had his hand on the seat in front of Fitz’s, and was leaning over discreetly so that his voice didn’t carry. “Your daughter is making...”

“My _what_?!” Fitz’s voice cracked horribly, logically knowing that he didn’t _have_ a daughter not making the shock (and, he was ashamed to admit it, slight horror) any less.

The flight attendant frowned, gaze flicking between Jemma and Fitz. “Yes, _your_ daughter...” This time, the man waved one finger unsubtly between the two of them, and they both realized what had happened at the same time: This man thought that _Skye_ was _their_ child.

“My sister,” Jemma piped up, tucking her book into her seat pocket and standing. “What’s going on?”

After giving Fitz an uncomfortable glance, the flight attendant motioned for Jemma to join him in the middle galley and they both strode away to speak in hushed voices. For his part, Fitz was still coming down from his irrational panic about being told that he had a daughter, and then he flushed at the idea of having a daughter with this genius he’d only just met. He wasn’t one of those people who spent a lot of time being impatient for having a family or children – his work was too important – so he consciously pushed aside the ludicrous nugget of warmth that flared in the pit of his stomach. 

Then his traitorous brain wandered over to the activity necessary to create children, placed both him and Jemma in a very compromising position in his imagination, and got entirely too carried away – all in the space of about five seconds. Fitz made a strangled noise of annoyance and covered his face with his hands, knowing logically that this wouldn’t do anything to stop the images flashing all too tantalizingly through his head but needing to do something. On top of being embarrassed by these thoughts (that, thank the lord, no one _ever_ had to know about), he was almost indignant on Jemma’s behalf – she was fantastically brilliant, and didn’t deserve to have some dopey engineer thinking about her this way. Even if he couldn’t help it.

Just as he was feeling incredibly unprofessional and fervently wishing that Jemma had been fifty years old with a harelip, she returned to her seat with Skye trailing morosely behind.

“Save your shenanigans for once we’ve arrived, please?” Jemma sounded faintly annoyed but not angry as she gave her sister a small shove towards her seat.

The girl plopped into the middle seat, refusing to look at her sister. “It’s so _boring_ , Jems, they don’t even have any Wi-Fi! And the movies suck.” 

“I could...” Fitz started but trailed off as the two sisters turned in unison to stare at him. “I – I mean, if you don’t mind, Jemma – I could show her something on...” He waved his hand vaguely at her closed laptop, feeling a flush rise along the back of his neck. The words had just sort of slipped out; he hadn’t _meant_ to interrupt their argument.

Thankfully, Jemma gave him a grateful smile and nodded, so he turned back to Skye. “So, you interested in getting a few coding tricks from someone who helped design the world’s first holotable?” He noticed Jemma’s jaw drop open at that, but when he glanced over she was staring intently down at her crossword puzzle book. 

The girl shrugged and pulled the laptop open, although she couldn’t quite hide the eagerness in her expression as she tapped in her password. Fitz settled into subtly testing exactly how skilled she was with computers, glancing over at her older sister whenever he thought he could get away with it.

 

\------

 

_Four Nights Later_

 

Fitz found himself pushed against the back of the Marriott’s elevator, hands fisting into Jemma’s cardigan as she slid her tongue heatedly into his mouth. The other passengers had just left, the door barely having been closed for five seconds, and he let out a small groan as she pressed the entire length of her body against his.

It was well past midnight, and for the third day in a row they’d spent their entire free evening working together, brainstorming ideas and sketching out designs for a rifle that would deliver nonlethal pellets, if they could get the casing right. Well, most of each evening – inevitably they’d strayed into more personal territory, chatting effortlessly about their respective isolated childhoods as scientifically-minded prodigies and any one of a dozen other topics. Last night had even ended with Jemma squeezing his knee and then leaving her hand there as he stared down at her lips – but that still hadn’t prepared Fitz for the way she’d just attacked him. He hadn’t planned on saying anything to her about being interested in more than just a professional relationship, but she’d taken care of that for him – in possibly the hottest way he could imagine.

“Your face,” she murmured against his skin, trailing her lips over his jaw and down to his pulse point, “is very symmetrical.”

He would have laughed at the adorable strangeness of her come-on if she hadn’t set to work leaving an impressive lovebite at the join of his neck and shoulder, meaning that the most he could do was let out another pleased groan. Her lips curved in a smile against his skin, and he was suddenly very certain that he was in big trouble where Jemma Simmons was concerned.

“Your room or mine?” She’d barely let her question hang for more than a second before leaning back to look up at him, cheeks tinged pink. “I don’t – this isn’t something that I... do. But. Um. I find you very interesting, far more than any of the other men I’ve ever met at any of these ridiculous conventions, and...”

Finding her simultaneous sexiness and awkwardness almost unbearably enchanting, Fitz slanted his lips over hers to halt her rambling, drawing her up for a few, long kisses. When he let her go, his gaze was slightly out of focus, although he did manage to register the darker flush of her lips and the brightness of her eyes. “I've never done this before either. Not, I mean – I’ve done t-that – but not at one of _these_...” Chuckling, he shook his head. “We’re a right pair. What I meant is that I’ll follow where you go, Jemma. I want to. Yours or mine.”

Her smiles were addictive, he decided as she leaned up to brush her lips against his again. “Mine, then,” she said, leaning away to press her floor button. “Thankfully it’s nowhere near my family’s room.”

“Thank God for Skye,” Fitz muttered as he drew her back into him. But she raised her eyebrows at his comment, and rather than the kissing he’d been hoping for he realized he should probably clarify that. “I meant for sitting next to me on the plane. Wouldn’t’ve ever talked to you if it weren’t for her.” 

Jemma laughed, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You owe her for tonight, too. She’s been teasing me about asking you out since the plane ride.” Her nose wrinkled in amusement as she pressed in closer, her fingertips rubbing distracting circles along the top of his spine. “But, let me give you some advice, Fitz. If you’re about to take a woman to bed – don’t mention her ten-year-old sister.”

Warmth flushed his face again, and he tried stuttering out an excuse, but Jemma didn’t seem to care much since she set about trailing her lips along his jaw again, effectively silencing him. Fitz slid his gaze up to the digital read-out, cursing his luck that they’d gotten stuck with the slowest bloody elevator in the world and thinking fervently that he couldn’t get her alone fast enough.


End file.
